


Salt

by PresquePommes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Headcanon, Malnutrition, Robotics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 02:03:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A self-reflective drabble on the possible ramifications of growing up alone in the middle of the ocean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt

You knew this was inevitable.

Like everything else you’ve ever done or been a part of, it’s bittersweet.

You’ve got all of the flavour, none of the sugar.

All of the salt.

Your name is Dirk Strider, and you can’t blame the ocean that surrounds you for what you’ve grown up to be.

From the beginning, you’ve had no one to blame but yourself.

Your bro knew you were coming, somehow. He prepared this place for you, filled it with everything you’d ever need to survive.

It was never his fault that you saw his personality in each and every piece. You saw the multi-billion dollar superstar in the SBaHJ posters and the negative value merchandise. You looked at a storeroom with one wall buried by a sloping avalanche of freeze-dried, concentrated and reconstitutable meals, every one of them marked with too-earnest measures of added nutritional content, and you saw a clumsy bachelor, sincere but helpless.

You looked to where the other wall should have been and found both wall and ceiling lost behind an absurd structure composed of a thousand meticulously vacuum-sealed bottles of Orange Crush and Fanta and Faygo and Orangette, a prolific, fastidiously organized wine cellar of orange dye and added sugar, and you saw the whimsy of someone who transcended irony by never really understanding it.

You learned the meaning of irony from the ludicrous sincerity of that action, bitterness from the realization that your brother never would.

He was gone long before you arrived.

You surpassed him long before you were ready.

This was never his fault.

In your precociousness, you robbed yourself of the only idol you were ever given.

And because it was ironic, you idolized him anyway.

And because you still meant it, it was bittersweet.

You looked at the shoddy robo-guardian he left you and saw his failings in the hand that had fed and changed you, because the hand was mechanical.

You saw that he could not see beyond the limitations of his own flesh. You saw an imagination that wove tapestries of Dali-esque absurdity but could not think in angles, was lost on measures of efficiency.

You were very young when you disassembled the hand that fed you, because it was mechanical, and you knew you could do better.

And you did better.

You were very young when you reconstructed the hand that fed you into something else, and so you were very young when you started feeding yourself.

You know now you were too young to feed yourself.

Without the buzzing intrusion of a mealtime notifier, you forgot to eat. Rather than interrupt yourself, you sat hunched on the floor with the lights in the middle of the day on so you could solder wire long past the fall of darkness. Rather than interrupt yourself, you made the same dry packet of noodles last far longer than it ever should have.

For the unwillingness to interrupt yourself, you’d realize that it had been days and not just hours when you reached to lift a bottle to your lips and found all the carbonation gone despite the cap.

And you started to grow weak. You started to grow thin, more a scaffold of bones than a being.

So rather than interrupt yourself, you fought what you had created, tested both yourself and what your hands had wrought, and called it pragmatism in the pursuit of perfection.

And with the exertion came hunger, and you ate.

But you ate thoughtlessly, sporadically and without moderation, and it did little more than keep you alive and mobile.

You realized this too late.

By the time you began to invest in your own nutrition, you had already done irreversible damage to yourself.

Because you had looked upon an artificial imitation of a man and found it lacking, you had never addressed the limitations of your own flesh.

It became obvious to you that a body was a far more complex mechanism than any you had created, and you were left without even the option of experimentation.

You were not, and are not, a machine, and you cannot replace the pieces of you left so long neglected.

You can only maintain what you have left.

Your body swears to you that the temperature of the world has risen as you’ve aged, but both your instruments and your auto-responder assure you otherwise, and they are not subjective.

But you still sweat endlessly in temperatures that should be tolerable, and so you pile towels nearby to absorb the evidence of your malfunction.

You stand under a hot spray of water and you don’t faint because this is what’s normal, because the world you left behind wrote hymnals for the love of a hot shower, and you pretend you’re not relieved when the hot water runs out.

You pretend you don’t stand under the cold water long after you stop feeling like you’re going to faint.

And you deny by omission, make your towels and your showers your idiosyncratic calling cards, but you fear you’ve destroyed your ability to properly thermoregulate.

You wanted to be a Nexus-6, but instead you are a windup, and one of your own creation.

In principle, it is ironic.

In reality, it is bittersweet.

Your hair is blanched yellow-white by long hours of sunlight spent fighting on the rooftop, and you sculpt it into a masterpiece of invulnerability and call it vanity and it is.

It is vanity and it is denial and it is hair roughened by the harshness of the sun and thickened by the salt of a sea that sometimes feeds you and buffeted by winds unbroken by the nothingness on your horizon and it’s ironic, it is infinitely ironic, because your surroundings shape you into something that looks invulnerable more efficiently than you ever could.

You wear sunglasses inside and in the middle of the night and you call it irony and it is.

It is irony and it is you, you who never learned to sleep with the lights off, you who can’t anymore.

You weave your own tapestry of absurdity and place yourself not in it, like a spider, but above it, like a bird, and you call it genius and it is.

It is genius and it is fear, absolute fear, because you will meet the people you have tried so hard to shape and temper with the forceful entitlement of your love and the desperation of your loneliness and the need to be the idol you never had, and you will not be Sawtooth.

You will not be a towering figure, a pair of flashing glasses under a windswept artistry of hair, an endless height of battle-hardened muscle.

The tick of your growth hasn’t moved by more than millimetres in years.

You’re afraid you’ll be shorter than them.

It’s absurd because as completely as you know it means nothing, you also know how completely you have become prey to your own vanity.

It’s ironic because as surely as you have manufactured your own image, you are also the artist of its inevitable destruction.

It’s bittersweet because as much you fear the possibility of their disappointment and rejection, you fear the possibility of their acceptance more.

You fear they won’t be surprised, that there won’t be confusion, because that would mean they never saw you as the idol you need so desperately to be.

But you’ve spent too long orchestrating this to change your mind now, and you’ve spent too long playing the idol to really appreciate the humour in being a victim to your own sense of irony, so you stand at the edge of a cliff you have already stepped off of and taste nothing but salt.

You knew this was inevitable.

You failed to recognize that it could be so bittersweet.


End file.
